General Compute
Insights on AI inference, ASIC infrastructure, and building fast AI applications.
115 posts across 5 topics
General Compute will bring Cerebras wafer-scale inference to its customers at scale. Capacity opens in Q1 2027, and agentic coding is the first workload. Here is what we are doing and why.
A deep look at how the architectural decisions baked into a transformer model at training time -- attention variant, layer count, hidden size, and more -- directly determine how fast and how cheaply it can run at inference time.
An AI inference server accepts prompts and returns model completions. Here's how they work, the main deployment options, and how to choose between managed APIs and self-hosted solutions.
Why inference speed is the new moat, real-time AI guides, and benchmarks comparing latency, throughput, and cost.
What time to first token and tokens per second actually measure, how to measure them correctly, and a layer-by-layer guide to reducing AI inference latency in production.
A head-to-head comparison of vLLM self-hosted on H100s versus GeneralCompute's managed inference API: full methodology, throughput and latency numbers, and a total cost of operations breakdown.
A step-by-step tutorial for building a voice AI agent with sub-500ms response times. Plus: why General Compute is the only provider fast enough to use reasoning models in a voice pipeline.
Coding agents make dozens of sequential LLM calls per task. Every millisecond of inference latency compounds across each step, making speed the single biggest infrastructure bottleneck for AI-powered developer tools.
Model quality has commoditized. The real competitive advantage in AI is how fast your infrastructure can deliver results. Inference speed is becoming the defining moat for AI-native products.
Technical deep-dives on the building blocks of modern LLM inference: attention, quantization, decoding, and architectures.
Flash Attention rewrites the attention computation to avoid moving a giant intermediate matrix in and out of GPU memory. Here is how the tiling and kernel fusion work, how v1, v2, and v3 evolved, and how to turn it on in PyTorch.
DPO aligns language models to human preferences without a separate reward model or reinforcement learning. Here is how it works, how it compares to RLHF, and when to reach for IPO, KTO, or ORPO instead.
A clear explanation of speculative decoding: how a small draft model proposes tokens that a large model verifies in parallel, why it preserves output quality, the Medusa and Eagle variants, and the real speedups you can expect in production.
A head-to-head look at LPUs, GPUs, and CPUs for AI inference, with the architecture reasons behind their performance, real-world latency and throughput trade-offs, cost-effectiveness, and which one fits each kind of workload.
A practical, end-to-end explanation of AI inference: what it is, how the pipeline works, the metrics that matter, the hardware that runs it, and the trade-offs you face when you put a model in production.
How attention concentrates on the first few tokens of every sequence, why naive sliding-window caching breaks long-context generation, and how StreamingLLM uses sink tokens to serve effectively unbounded streams.
How MoE routing actually works during serving, why sparse activation makes large models cheaper to run per token, and what changes for the inference stack.
A practical guide to knowledge distillation for production inference: what actually works, what to skip, and how to ship a smaller model without losing the behavior you cared about.
Why 8-bit floating point hits a different point on the accuracy/throughput curve than INT8, how E4M3 and E5M2 are used in practice, and what FP8 actually buys you in production serving.
A close look at how AWQ picks salient weight channels, applies per-channel scaling, and why it consistently beats round-to-nearest 4-bit quantization for LLM inference.
How structured state space models like Mamba achieve constant-time per-token inference, and why the selective scan changes the trade-off space for long-context serving.
How RWKV and linear attention architectures collapse the per-token cost of generation to O(1), and what that means for serving long-context workloads.
Attention cost grows with the square of sequence length. Token merging and token pruning shrink that sequence mid-network, trading a little accuracy for real speedups. Here is how ToMe works, how the idea extends to language models, and where it breaks down.
Ring Attention distributes the attention computation across devices in a ring topology, overlapping KV transfer with compute so context length scales linearly with the number of GPUs.
Quantization shrinks model weights from 16-bit to 4-bit or 8-bit, cutting memory usage and speeding up inference. Here's how the major techniques work and when to use each one.
The PagedAttention paper solved the biggest memory waste problem in LLM serving by borrowing an idea from operating systems. Here's how it works and why vLLM became the default serving framework.
FlashAttention rewrote the rules of transformer inference by treating attention as a memory problem, not a compute problem. Here's how it works and why it matters.
Tool calling, multi-agent architectures, reasoning patterns, and the inference requirements behind production agents.
Streaming in agentic pipelines is not the same as streaming chat tokens. Partial tool calls, pipelined steps, and early cancellation change what the user experiences.
Why running multiple tool calls in parallel changes the latency math of an agent, and how inference speed determines whether the parallelism is worth doing.
How agents reconstruct memory between turns, and the latency trade-offs between long context, RAG, summarization, and KV cache reuse.
A practical breakdown of the latency budget inside a code agent, step by step, and why every link in the chain needs to land under a second to keep the loop usable.
Popular agent reasoning patterns are described as prompt techniques, but they are inference cost multipliers. Here is how ReAct, Reflexion, and Chain-of-Thought actually shape the bill and the latency.
Orchestrator and worker patterns make multi-agent systems easy to design and expensive to run. Here is where the inference cost actually goes, and what it means for the infrastructure underneath.
Function calling looks simple on paper, but the latency budget of a tool-using LLM is dominated by short structured generations that most serving stacks are not optimized for. This is what actually makes tool calls feel slow.
Agents make many sequential LLM calls per task, and each one pays the full latency of decoding. This post walks through how that compounds and why fast inference changes which agents are even viable.
Speculative decoding, KV cache, tensor parallelism, batching strategies, and the systems that serve LLMs at scale.
General Compute will bring Cerebras wafer-scale inference to its customers at scale. Capacity opens in Q1 2027, and agentic coding is the first workload. Here is what we are doing and why.
A practical guide to LLM quantization: what INT4, GGUF, and GPTQ actually do, how much quality you lose, and how to quantize a model yourself with llama.cpp and AutoGPTQ.
How modern ML compilers turn Python model code into fused, fast kernels. A practical look at TorchInductor, Triton, and XLA, and the tradeoffs each one makes for inference.
Picking a draft model is the most consequential decision when deploying speculative decoding. A practical guide to acceptance rates, sizing, and the tradeoffs that decide whether you actually get a speedup.
How tensor and pipeline parallelism actually differ in production inference, when to use each, and why most serving stacks end up combining them.
How prefix caching works in modern LLM serving stacks, why it changes the economics of long system prompts and RAG, and what to watch out for in production.
Batching is the lever that turns idle GPU silicon into served tokens. This post walks through the evolution of batching for LLM serving, from one-at-a-time to static batches to request-level dynamic batching to iteration-level continuous batching, and shows where each strategy still leaves throughput on the floor.
In LLM serving, a single long-running request can stall everyone else sharing the same batch. S3 attacks that by predicting output length and scheduling around it. Here is what stragglers actually cost you, and how output-length-aware scheduling helps.
Prefill pins the compute units while decode starves for memory bandwidth. Sarathi-Serve splits prefill into chunks and piggybacks decodes on them, keeping both resources busy in the same batch. Here is how it works and where the limits are.
FrugalGPT and its descendants show that most queries do not need the biggest model. We walk through the cascade pattern, routing classifiers, and the engineering trade-offs of sending easy work to cheap models and escalating only when needed.
Lookahead decoding from LMSYS speeds up autoregressive generation without requiring a draft model. We walk through the Jacobi iteration trick, the n-gram pool, and what the speedups actually look like in practice.
Prefill and decode have different compute profiles and clash when they share a GPU. Splitwise and DistServe separate them onto different hardware pools. We walk through why, how, and when it actually pays off.
DeepSeek's Multi-Head Latent Attention cuts the KV cache by an order of magnitude without giving up quality. We walk through MLA, how it compares to MQA and GQA, and the other compression techniques worth knowing.
MQA and GQA reduce the memory footprint of attention by sharing key-value heads across queries. A simple architectural change that makes inference dramatically faster.
Before continuous batching, LLM servers wasted GPU cycles waiting for the slowest request in each batch. Orca's iteration-level scheduling fixed this with a 36x throughput improvement.
The original speculative decoding papers needed a separate draft model. Medusa, EAGLE, and Sequoia found ways to speculate faster, smarter, and without the extra model.
SGLang's RadixAttention stores KV cache in a radix tree, enabling automatic prefix sharing across requests. The result is up to 5x higher throughput for multi-turn and structured workloads.
Speculative decoding uses a small draft model to predict multiple tokens ahead, then verifies them all at once. The result is mathematically identical output, 2-3x faster.
Guides and benchmarks for the latest open-source and proprietary models, with practical tips for running them in production.
A practical map of the open-source LLM ecosystem in 2025: the leading model families, how they stack up by size and task, what the licenses actually let you do, and how to pick one for production.
Faster-Whisper reimplements OpenAI's Whisper on CTranslate2 with INT8 inference, running several times faster at the same accuracy. Here is how it works, how streaming differs from batch transcription, and how it fits into a real-time STT to LLM to TTS voice pipeline.
QwQ-32B is a 32-billion-parameter open-weight reasoning model from the Qwen team that competes with much larger reasoning models. Here is how it works, how it compares to o1, o1-mini, and DeepSeek R1, and what its long reasoning traces mean when you serve it in production.
A practical walkthrough for fine-tuning Llama 4: when to do it, how to prepare data, and working LoRA, QLoRA, and full fine-tune code, plus evaluation and deployment.
A close look at Qwen3-Coder: how it scores on HumanEval, MBPP, and SWE-bench, how it compares to Code Llama and DeepSeek Coder, and how to wire it into your editor and agents.
A practical guide to running Llama 4 on GeneralCompute: the model variants, what hardware they need, how to make your first API call, and how to tune requests for speed and cost.
DeepSeek R1 is an open-weight reasoning model trained mostly through reinforcement learning. Here is how its architecture and training work, how it compares to GPT-4 class models, Claude, and Llama, and what its reasoning style means for inference.